Sunday 13 March 2011

Gaming Entaggle


Entaggle is a new peer recognition web site that seems to be taking off fast.

Some people such as Darren McMillan have already blogged about its usability

The site itself has usage guidelines which aim to stop spamming and positivity.

It wasn't too hard to find a way to game the system:

1) Create a positive tag, publicly available that people will want to associate themselves with.

2) Tag people with it - especially some well know names

3) Once you've built up a good number of people with the tag - Edit the tag so it reflects what you want to market

4) Voila, now you have a group of people associated with your scheme.

I created a tag 'Weekend Tester' as a public tag then found there was a private one called the same. Tag deletion is not yet an option so I decided to change the tag I'd created to something else ( no-one else had yet tagged themselves with it ).

This is when I realised that people who had tagged themselves with a tag could find themselves tagged as something completely different if the tag was changed...
maybe "fan of ISEB certification"

Thanks to 007 Unlicensed to Test for helping me illustrate the point. He tagged himself as a Weekend Tester and now finds himself as a fan of this site

2 comments:

Joe said...

Exactly the reasons why i have elected not to participate yet.

I asked Elizabeth Hendrickson how I could delete my profile if I decided that I no longer wanted to participate. Elizabeth said "At the moment, there is no way to delete your profile. (Actually, at the moment, there isn't even a way to *edit* your profile. Ah, the joys of shipping a truly *minimally* viable product.)"

To me, they haven't quite hit the viability mark yet.

BTW - I am a fan of your site, even if I choose not to become entaggled quite yet.

Elisabeth said...

Entaggle had a minimum viable feature set when I announced it: just enough that people could see where it was heading, but lacking many basic capabilities one would expect to be part of a service like this.

We're adding new capabilities to the code base every day. (And FWIW you can now edit your profile on Entaggle, although you still can't delete it as of this writing.)

There are a stream of stories coming shortly that will address the risk raised in this post. Among them: notifying tag holders when the tag changes; the ability to remove a tagging; and a whole set of stories around moderation and flagging.

Entaggle demonstrably already has value for some people. So I stand by my decision to make it publicly available before I considered it "feature complete."

That said, I understand completely when someone like Joe tells me that they need it to have more of the capabilities one would expect from a service like this before they're willing to join.

Rest assured those features are coming.